Thursday, May 12, 2016

I'm walking down the long, tiled hallway that leads to the lobby of the office I frequently work in. Behind me, I start to hear, "PLAP! PLAP! PLAP! PLAP! PLAP!". Eventually, a late twenty-something comes "running" past me.

Note: I put running in quotes because he wasn't traveling significantly faster than me, just much more loudly.

As he passes by, I notice that the cause of the "PLAP!" sound is that he is attempting to run in leather-soled business shoes. His lack of speed - for all his clamor - is due to a combination of the shoes not being well-suited to any form of running and the fact that the tile floor gave his leather soles little in the way of meaningful purchase with which to propel himself.

Making matters worse, he was wearing a backpack while running. By itself, the wearing of the backpack would have been of little note. However, it was so loosely secured that with each bounding-stride (seriously: dude had more vertical travel than forward), that it was bouncing and flopping all over the place. As it flopped and bounced, it contributed a fwipping nylon and buckles sound to the rest of his noisy run.

The thing to complete this picture was that he was wearing a poorly-tailored suit. The suit was so loosely-fit that it, too, was bouncing around much like his backpack. I imagine that, had there not been so much other noise in his passage, that the rustling of the suit's synthetic fabrics would have been making their own din.

It was nearly 15:00 and traffic leaving our business campus becomes horrible not much after. I was similarly inclined to get out as quickly as I could (I usually leave at 14:00) to avoid the trial of incipient rush-hour traffic. So, in his defense, I could understand the rush to get out of the building. Still, for all the sound and fury, the effective pace meant he wasn't likely to be avoiding a meaningful amount of traffic.